by Greg Curtis
One thing truly surprised him. That there were so many people of every race here. And so few of them were human. There were more dwarves than humans. And this was supposed to be a human town in the human realm. But he understood the reason for that. Even as he watched a giant and a dwarf walking down the street, deep in conversation while a couple of sylph looked on.
“So finally Stonely,” Dah commented tiredly. “It doesn't look like much! Where's the glass towers? The shining steel?”
“It's a simple human town,” Allide reminded her. “You can't expect it to look like the great cities of your home.”
“I know. But some crystal and coloured glass would be nice. A few domes here and there. Sparkling fountains. Statues. Some attention to the beauty of the world.”
“There's flowers in those window boxes,” the dryad pointed out. “Some pretty gardens.”
The sylph didn't reply. Fylarne guessed that that wasn't what she thought of as beautiful. Flowers were likely weeds to Dah. Polished crystal and magnificent edifices were what she thought of as beauty.
“I like it!” Trey announced as he petted his baby dragon. “It's like home. Except for all you people of course.”
The boy had to add the last, Fylarne thought sourly. Even after so many weeks travelling together he still thought of the rest of them as sports and oddities. He didn't use the word any more – he'd learned that much. But the thought was there in his head, always. But then he supposed, the lad was young and until recently he'd never seen anyone who wasn't human. It would take time.
“That way, across the square, is where I imagine the people running this place will be found. The tall building with all the columns. It's the town hall.”
He was likely right. Not only was it in the centre of the roads full of portals lining the square, it was where most of the people seemed to be as they hurried to do their work. And it was where the most magic seemed to be concentrated. The building was practically glowing with it.
Without a word they set off for it, the five of them forming surely one of the strangest groups ever to be seen. A copper elf, a dryad, a sylph, a wood elf, and a human boy with a pet dragon. And all of them dressed in heavy clothes and looking dishevelled from the road. But strangely no one gave them a second glance. Partly they were obviously too busy to care. But mostly Fylarne suspected, it was simply because here, in this town, they weren't that odd at all. Especially when he spotted a female ogre with a black baby dragon of her own wandering from one building to another.
He stared at her for a bit, surprised to see one of her people there. Obviously the chaos among the worlds was growing worse. And he noticed that Trey was also looking – but probably more at the little black dragon wrapped around her neck. Neither of them said anything, and soon they moved on, hurrying a little to catch up with the others.
Ogres and black dragons weren't really what was on his mind though as he headed for the building. It was that this was the end of his journey. Here he would confess his crimes and then in due course receive his judgement. Probably be hung as he deserved. But here he would also tell them what they had found in N'Diel. And maybe some way of freeing the people from their madness would be found from what they told them. Maybe they would free his family. That was what mattered.
When they reached the steps at the front of the main building, a marble stone structure of some sort which Trey kept insisting was the town hall – they finally attracted some attention. A young high elf stopped hem and told them that they couldn't bring weapons inside the hall. Actually he told Gris that. The wood elf was as always carrying his huge longbow on his back and Fylarne knew even before he opened his mouth let alone said anything that he wasn't going to give it up now. Bows were special to wood elves. Even more so than battle-axes to dwarves.
“His bow is sacred to him,” Dah told the high elf before Gris could even begin to speak. “But you can trust him. And we need to speak to the leaders of this town. We have word from N'Diel. We've come from there.”
“N'Diel?!” The young elf stared at her. “You've been there?!” Then he abruptly turned and scurried up the stairs and into the hall, shouting at them to wait even as he vanished. Obviously the world of the sprites was still important even in the midst of everything else that was happening.
A few minutes later a group of half a dozen or so casters came hurrying out of the hall to greet them at the foot of the steps.
They looked tired, Fylarne thought. They probably were. If what they had heard on their journey was true, this little human town was now one of the centres of efforts to try and contain the ongoing disaster as bits of worlds were shuffled around. Or rather as portal walls were brought down as they now knew. It was here that they received word of each new problem as it arose and sent people out to deal with it. That was scores of worlds and likely thousands of individual crises every day. All while they tried to keep this new, vast portal spiderweb working. They were probably more than tired.
“You've been to N'Diel?” A grizzled looking giant snapped at them.
“We have,” Dah replied calmly. “And it's not what you imagine.”
“Ah huh?”
“The people there, the slaves and the sprites both, are caught in some sort of madness. Mining the spent lava from a volcano and burying it in a chasm. They seem to have no will of their own.”
Fylarne could see the looks on their faces and he knew the leaders had doubts. It was only to be expected. He wouldn't have believed it either. But he also knew it was the truth and that Dah was a good speaker. So he let her explain. To tell the entire sorry tale of what they'd found. His confession could wait. And the others were happy to let her speak as well. They were tired and now all they wanted to do was rest.
It took time for the sylph to tell them everything, though he noticed that she left out one thing – his role in what had happened. And when she was done it took the others more time to absorb it. To make some sense out of it. And then to formulate some questions.
“There is a second volcano infused with the Heartfire? How can you know this?”
“Because I know it. And I told them.” Fylarne stepped forwards. It was finally time to admit his little piece of this disaster, he knew. “I am Fylarne Dorne and I was until recently the Head Guardian at the Heartfire Temple.” He stared at them all in turn. “And I am the traitor who let the sprites attack the Temple. And perhaps the fool who then set them on this path of utter destruction.”
By the gods it was a hard thing to say. Hard to admit. And he knew that he was confessing to a terrible crime that would undoubtedly cost him everything. But it had to be said and in some small way it was a relief to get the words out. Finally.
So he carried on. He told them of his family and what he'd done. He told them of the books that he'd rewritten and given to the sprites. And he told them of the attack and the friends he'd sacrificed to save his family. He told them everything.
And when he was done he stood there, studied their shocked faces and the horror in their eyes, and waited. It was over for him. Now all he had to do was wait for the noose to be slipped around his throat. Then he would be at peace.
Chapter Thirty Five
Puddlesford. A town he'd never heard of in a realm he'd never visited. But at least he knew of Eastmarsh. It was part of the world of Althern – though as it turned out, Althern might not be a world for much longer. What it would be, he didn't know. A scattering of pieces of a world, magically rearranged among the scatterings of many other worlds. Some days his brain just couldn't quite wrap itself around that idea.
This day however, he didn't care about such things. He had been sent here because of the tower that had unexpectedly arrived in the middle of one of the town's streets.
Actually, it had carved an entire new section for itself in the middle of the town. A circle of long, brown grass that looked as though it was dying, around which the black seal road ran. And there, he thought, was the absolute proof of what was happening to the w
orld. The black bitumen road had been neatly divided into two halves, both of which circled the brown grass section. The tower was just another piece of another world that had appeared in the middle of it. And yet the connection between the two parts was seamless. In this case there weren't even any geysers or up-wellings of magma. It was an almost perfect border.
But none of that mattered when the tower itself was a construction out of some dark dream. The stone was black, but that was more than just a colour. It was dark in a way that made his skin crawl. It had done the same to the people of Puddlesford who had now scattered to the furthest edges of town, before sending a panicked message to the gifted. He couldn't blame them for that. The tower reeked of evil. And until then he would never have known that evil could reek at all.
It was also a military structure. The windows in the slender column that supported the platform at the top – what few there were – were tiny. Just large enough to let in some light, but not let a man gain entry. And they had black iron bars on them. The door at the base was a fortified construction with more iron bars everywhere. And at the top, on the great round platform, there were things bolted to it that he thought might be weapons. Some sort of cannons perhaps. This was a sentry tower.
The other thing about the tower that bothered him for some reason, was that it leaned. It stood on angle that was great enough that he kept thinking it should fall over. A dozen stories high and far too spindly to support the enormous disk shaped platform at the top, he was certain it should either fall over or snap in two. Yet it didn't. Instead it stubbornly stood there as if it had been like that for a thousand years, looming over the surrounding town.
Why had no one fixed that? The tower could have been straightened surely. Perhaps not easily, but it could have been done. Unless someone liked it like that!
It had to be horribly uncomfortable inside. All the floors had to slope to the point where anyone inside must have thought they were falling. And furniture surely had to slide across the floors. There was something very troubling about that. But more than that, climbing the dozen stories of stairs to reach the top when the whole tower leaned at such an angle, had to be a true nightmare. There weren't even any windows in the central column. What sort of a being could live in a place like that? And yet someone did live in it. At least according to the townsfolk who had sworn that they'd seen people in the windows.
Actually the claimed that they'd seen ghosts. That the people inside weren't people at all. They were pale skinned undead. Spectres, perhaps. But as he studied the top of the tower through the spyglass he couldn't see anyone inside. And certainly there was no one on the balcony that completely surrounded saucer like platform at the top. Not that he'd want to stand out on that balcony when it leaned at such an angle over a steep fall.
“So you can send it away?” One of the guards asked him as he studied the tower. “Back to the Great Beast's lair?”
“It didn't come from there,” Chy answered the man. “And no.” He could have told the man that this was actually where it belonged and it had always been there, separated only by a spell, but he knew the guard wouldn't have believed him – or understood him. He still had problems believing it. “But one thing I can tell you, don't touch the grass.”
“What?!”
“That,” Chy pointed at a set of bones not far from them, “was a dog not long ago. The brown grass will kill you.”
“Grass can't kill you!” the guard replied in disbelief.
“This grass can. I think it's concentrated acid that burns right through the skin. But what it is is less important than why.”
“Why?” The man kept staring at the grass.
“Is it to keep whoever's inside the tower in? Or to stop people from entering it? Is this a prison or a fortress?” Either way though, he suspected that whoever was inside was dangerous.
“Whichever it is it should be left well alone,” a woman unexpectedly announced.
“Nga Roth?” He turned to see her, only to stop dead and stand there with his mouth hanging open when he set eyes on her. But as surprised as he was, the guard was a hundred times worse, as he leapt into the air and then backed away hurriedly, his face bone white. He hadn't seen a lot of ogres, Chy guessed. But then he hadn't seen her like this before either.
The ogre had been shopping it seemed. Clothes shopping. And her former dress had been replaced with something he couldn't even imagine when he was staring right at it! A dress of violent orange that clashed horribly with her green skin and which fitted her like a tent. But that was only the start. She had on heavy working boots and a bonnet drenched in flowers. And naturally her pet miniature dragon was wrapped around her neck, hissing at him.
“You've changed?” Chy eventually gasped out hoping he wasn't going to go blind! Because someone here was certainly without sight.
“You like?” She grinned broadly. “I took that iron wagon to the town and had the seamstress make me it. The others are going to be so jealous when they see me! And the men!” Her grin grew even broader. “Oh the men!”
“It's very … striking.” Chy didn't even want to think about the men. They had to be horrifying. Though no doubt they did all the same things as other people did and likely found Nga Roth fetching. Each to their own. So maybe they might somehow even imagine that Nga Roth's new dress was pretty instead of garish. “So you know what this tower is?” he changed the topic.
“Bad. There are others. And if you get too near them, boy, you die.” Her smile faded. “We stay away from them.”
“So you came to tell me to leave it alone?” Chy guessed that was why she was there. He couldn't imagine why else she would have come. And for all that she was an ogre, she seemed like a decent woman – with truly horrible taste in clothes! But still he had to wonder why she'd come in the flesh. She was living in Stonely which these days was filled with portals and casters. She could have just sent him a sending.
“And to fix this before you did something foolish.”
“Fix it? How?” But even as he asked, he heard the crackling of ice freezing fast, turned and saw the answer for himself. She was freezing the area. All of it.
“Oh.” Chy watched her work while wondering what exactly she thought he might do that was so foolish. But more than that he felt her magic. And it was powerful. The dead brown grass was freezing in front of him. And so was the land underneath it. But more than that, the ice was forming around the base of the leaning tower and slowly climbing up it. The ogre was strong in her gift. And all he gathered, without her ever having sat on one of the thrones. But there was still a problem.
“You do know it's going to thaw?” he asked her as she worked. She would have to keep returning here to reset the casting every few days or weeks.
“Not this casting. It endures.” She continued her work, fairly quickly turning the entire area into an ice white wonder. “Except with this one for some reason. When the walls broke down and it came here, the spell of ice on it must have failed. Whatever was inside it, would have been close to waking up.”
“We are lucky to get here in time. Soon it would have started drawing people to it.” Then when she was done covering the structure in ice, Nga Roth started building a wall of ice right around it.
To keep people out of it, Chy wondered? Or to stop whatever was inside it from escaping? Whichever it was, she was good at it, and fairly soon there was a wall of ice completely surrounding the tower, that stood at least ten feet high. Meanwhile he was studying her work, feeling the twist she'd added to the casting to make it endure. He could do that, he thought. Now that he knew how. Maybe there was something good to come out of all this chaos – he could learn his magic without having to sit on the thrones. Some anyway.
“You've done this before?”
“These tower fortifications are common on Staal, and everyone is taught to keep their distance. But children still sometimes make mistakes. So we build these ice prisons around them.”
“And has anyone tried t
o talk to those inside?” It was an obvious thing to do. Maybe it would be dangerous to do more than that. And especially to think about freeing those inside. But talking didn't seem too risky.
“Only in the ancient legends – and they never end well.”
“How badly do they end?” He asked as he saw her crafting a vicious looking array of ice spikes on the top of the wall. Things clearly designed to stop anyone trying to climb over it from either direction. So a wall wasn't enough to keep people from doing foolish things? That did not seem good.
“There's a town called Darok. Or there was a town. But long ago, so long ago that it is but a legend, a powerful wizard by the name of Festi Di Nar sought to make contact with someone in a tower. Darok was destroyed. The land around it was poisoned. And from it the shades arose.” She finished her work creating the massive crown of icy spikes on the wall and turned to stare at him. “So Boy, pretty bad.”